Agrarian policy of the Nazis in Western Belarus in 1941-1944: planning, provision, implementation with Dr. Sviatlana Kazlova

Abstrakt
This presentation is based on a recent book that analyses the Nazi agrarian policy on the territory of occupied Western Belarus in 1941–1944. As this territory was annexed by the Soviet Union only in 1939, the organisation of agriculture differed from that elsewhere in the USSR, for example through the almost complete absence of collective farms.

Nazi agrarian policy in Western Belarus was based on various economic measures, such as taxation, as well as on running agricultural enterprises. These economic plans changed over time in response to developments on the Eastern Front. One important finding was that actively disseminated economic propaganda played an important role in the implementation of Nazi agrarian policy. Another key finding was that Dutch collaborationist organizations, such as CULANO and the Netherlands East Company, took an active part in the Nazi colonization of Western Belarus. Finally, it was found that, due to shortages of specialist personnel, members of the local population were actively recruited to agricultural schools established by the Nazis.

The study is an example of writing the history of everyday life under occupation, and is based on documentary sources from the archives of Germany, Belarus, and the Netherlands.

Speaker bio
Sviatlana Kazlova, PhD in History. In 2000 she graduated from the Brest State University (Belarus) with a bachelor's degree in history. She graduated from the University of Bialystok (Poland) with a master's degree in history of sociology in 2001. In 2004 she passed a scientific internship at the Free University of Berlin (Germany). In 2005 she completed her doctoral studies at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus. In 2006 she defended her dissertation on the agrarian policy of the German occupation authorities in the western regions of Belarus. From 2006 to 2014 she worked as a researcher at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus. Author of more than 60 scientific articles, she explores the topics of the economic policy of the Nazis in occupied Belarus (1941-1944), the Soviet-Japanese war (1945), and military conflicts in China and Korea (1950-1953). Since 2014 she has been living in Sweden, working as a freelance historian. In 2019, in Belarus, she published the book "Agrarian policy of the Nazis in Western Belarus in 1941-1944: planning, provision, implementation".